


Interrogation

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen, dark-bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 13:43:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>dark-bingo prompt 'threats'.  Set on Cybertron before RID and MTMTE split.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interrogation

 

“For the record,” Rung said, frowning. “I really don’t feel quite comfortable with this.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t really this important,” Bumblebee said, leaning heavily on his cane. It was, Rung considered, becoming almost more of a prop to Bumblebee than a medical device. 

“I’m not sure how much good I can do.” Rung looked between Bumblebee—stern—and Prowl—absolutely stony. No empathy between them. This? This was what was leading Cybertron?  The expedition with Rodimus was beginning to sound better and better. 

“Do your best,” Prowl said, somehow making the words seem hollow and thin. “Any insight you might have can only help us.”

Well, that was something reasonable, Rung thought. He rolled the tension out of his shoulders. “I suppose I could at least try.”

“Excellent,” Bumblebee said, with that air of slight impatience of someone finally getting his way.  “And don’t worry. Sideswipe will be right outside the door if anything happens.” He jerked his horned helm over at the red mech, who’d been leaning against the doorway, a gun cradled in his arms.  Sideswipe elbowed himself off the wall, falling into step as the three of them moved toward the Kimia gun, dragging Rung in their eddying wake. 

“Comforting,” he said, trying hard—really hard—not to calculate how much time it could take to break through one of Kimia’s secure facility doors and how much damage Starscream could do in that time.

That wasn’t helpful. And besides, he thought, he’d faced worse. He’d had Impactor pin him against the wall, yelling so loudly his audials fuzzed. He’d dealt with hundreds of fractious patients, over the years. This was just one with a Decepticon badge. That’s all. He could handle this.  Starscream hardly had Impactor’s temper, or Whirl’s instability, or Red Alert’s hostile paranoia.  No, he was likely just…crafty, seeking an angle to survive. 

They all were.

Kimia was strange like this: he missed, acutely, the thrum and gentle suckpull of the artificial grav beneath his feet, the awareness, however dim, of solidness and space.  Knowing the lab was shattered, smashed against the planet’s surface like a broken toy, somehow made everything seem a little off kilter.

Just that, he thought, stepping through the doorway, past Sideswipe, who dutifully pivoted and rested by the door.  “Starscream,” he said, settling himself down at the battered table, queuing up the non-transmitting datapad Prowl had given him.

“You?” The jet didn’t bother to hide his disdain. Or, Rung thought, he was using disdain to hide something else.  “They think I’m going to tell you anything?”

“I think we just want to ask you a few questions in a way that didn't make you uncomfortable." He sighed. Been here before. "I'm Rung." 

“You definitely check the ‘nonthreatening’ box, Rung,” Starscream said, tilting back in the chair, his fixed-wings scraping the sides. He was doing that 'wary studying' stare, deliberately insolet. 

Rung felt something like a dull anger stir, even as he knew the Decepticon was merely trying to get a rise out of him. Don’t be goaded, Rung, he told himself. You’re here to gather information.  “Would you prefer I were someone else?”

A slightly-studied toss of the head.  “And now the Autobots are asking after my preferences. How sweet.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Rung said.  He’d dealt with evasion frequently enough that he didn’t even change tone.

“I don’t even know you,” Starscream said, making a show of examining the back of one blue hand. 

“And that’s a problem for you?”

A negligent shrug. “I would have thought I’d rate higher in priorities,” the jet said, “But then again, it fits with all the other hundred incompetencies I’ve seen so far.”  He moued. “Really, it’s amazing that your side could keep an army running at all.”

Digs at pride, Rung thought, cataloguing them almost idly.  We always attack where we’re vulnerable ourselves. 

“Amazing, yes,” Rung said, noncommittally. “But perhaps it’s better me than anyone else, with whom you might have, well, friction.”

“Friction.”  Starscream laughed, tipping his chin at the door. “You mean like the red bully you brought with you?”

“Sideswipe?”

“Oh, really now, Rung. Don’t sound so surprised.  Your big and angsty friend out there has quite a reputation.”

“As do you.”

That glint of a smirk, almost proud. “I’m sure I do. But, well, let me give you a bit of a hint.  We’re not the ones the NAILs are afraid of.” Another gesture at the door. “If you want my advice,” he said, voice smooth like melting grease, “he’s the one who needs your services far more than I.”

Ah. A bit of a lightbulb went off. “You think I’m here to diagnose you.” 

“You’re welcome to try,” Starscream said.  “If you like wasting your time.”

“Why would it be a waste of time?”

“Because there’s nothing wrong with me.”

Rung let his gaze linger on the inhibitor claw, the restraints. “Someone would seem to disagree.”

A laugh, light and breezy. “Ah, Ultra Magnus.  He has,” he lowered his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, “issues.”

“And you don’t.”  Merely asking, for self-concept. 

“Oh, I’m sure I do.” Another negligent gesture, overdoing the grace, trying to remind Rung of his aristocratic lineage, it seemed.  It was a stark change from a mech like Impactor, who wanted Rung to remember only that he was small and very, very breakable.  “But nothing like your kind.”

“My kind? As in Autobots?”

“Your kind as in what you do.”

A quirked eyebrow. 

“You think you’re in any position to judge any of us?”  A laugh.

“Is that what you think I do? Judge people?”

A pinch of the mouth, as though rethinking, resharpening his barb, and then Starscream sat forward, red optics twinkling, almost merrily. “I think,” he drawled, “you’re worse than any of us.”

That was…unexpected.  “How so?”  He felt control slipping. He’d had combative patients before, but they were always more or less voluntary, knowing they could push so far, but not too far, because they needed what he could do for them.

“You think you can affix labels on us, make sense of things with your cute little diagnoses and treatment plans. You think you can control us, control the world, through this.” Starscream’s manacled hands reached up, one blue digit tapping at his own head. “Let me ask you something, Rung. Just how many, and I mean a number, a solid number, of mechs have you actually cured?”

‘Red Alert’, he almost said, but remembered how fragile it was. Four hundred years and Red Alert was still a mass of neuroses. Had he really helped anyone, in all this time? 

"Cure is relative," he said. "I've helped mechs recover, become functional again." 

"Functional enough to go back to war to get themselves shot at or watch more friends die.  I'm sure they're so very grateful, Rung." 

Rung was normally calm, and he hated that these barbs were getting to him, but they were. Right in his core, right in the center of why he'd chosen this field, what he believed in. He hadn't believed in the war, but he'd told himself that helping the Autobots be able to fight was helping the right side win. He'd always been aware of the moral complexity. He'd never been implicated in it before. 

Starscream sat back, his grin aflame with triumph. “Honestly. When it comes down to it, who’s the crazy one?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The original intent in this piece was going to be Rung pwning Starscream with his ability to manipulate psychology. But in the end, in my headcanon, Rung has an ethical core of solid tungsten, and to interrogate and manipulate, he'd have to be a sociopath. In short, I couldn't do it. x_x


End file.
